Unland. the crest of the dune act as the sea wall (3-6m), providing a new generation of ground planes, horizontal and otherwise.

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3 Proposal: Unland the crest of the dune act as the sea wall (3-6m), providing a new generation of ground planes, horizontal and otherwise. For: Next Helsinki Infrastructure: Unland In its current form, the Helsinki south harbor imposes a too-simple geometry on/against the landform it sculpts: dead flat, incapable of motion up or down without structural failure... less adaptable, less durable, and less specific than the self-shaping landscape it pre-empts. Does the urban fabric have to set itself AGAINST what comes naturally, or the passage of time, or evolving water levels and weather patterns and ways of settlement? We don't think so. As soon as we stop thinking of the harbor's urban-ness as the contrary of its environment-ness, its gradual building-out as something like, but not of, LAND starts to make sense: why shouldn't the street rise up beyond the 3-meter water level rise (long-term) or surges (sooner or later), providing sheltered space beneath for longer seasons of outdoor use? Maybe some day those "caves" will need to be filled in, and taller slopes built up above. It needn't be a crisis of urban planning, or infrastructure design, just a matter of ensuring that current investments are reasonable, and adaptable, like real land. BUILD Caves and Hills Anti-buildings, non-sculptures, post-urban, un-landscape. As soon as we stopped assuming that buildings and sculptures and cities and landscapes were discrete patterns, the next south harbor became imaginable. An incrementally built dune-deck can shelter the city from water level rise in the first 100 years as a smaller sea wall (30-90cm) with program built underneath for local civic and cultural and commercial uses, and port functions as they will surely continue to evolve, albeit in ways that can't specifically be predicted, only prepared and allowed for. Over the next 500, the first generation of caves can be filled in, to let Fig. 1 Rosalind Krauss Sculpture in the Expanded Field October vol. 8 (Spring 1979) p. 37. The "cave" will act as a raw structure in the first phase (100 years) to shelter markets (bazaars), cultural pop-ups and semi-permanent occupation, extending the usable seasons and range of uses, subject to remaining evacuable for storm events etc. In the second phase (500 Years), the initial set of platforms and pillars and openings will settle downward as substrata: the caves, like natural ones, may be filled with water or earth over time. The investments will be substantial, but so will the returns the New York City area suffered 68 billion dollars in damage in one night, not too long ago. Sandy wasn't even a proper hurricane, and the next century of mean sea level rise had yet to occur.

4 In the near term, the raised and sloped decks can offer a variety of seasonal un-land surfaces and uses: markets can be underneath in one season and above in another; summer grasses and tourists stepping off cruise ships can populate the same artificial slopes as sleds and skis in in winter... The decks will be lamellar concrete structures. Recessed slabs will hold the green roofs. Abundant skylight openngs will allow light to the program underneath. The existing covered market's clerestory windows will still be open to the sky as the deck is built around it at second-story height. At the "big end" of this strategy, the proposed construction techniques and approach to implementation make a large-scale intervention practical, especially as it is distributed over a reasonable (appropriate) timeline. At the "little end", the skylights can work in conjunction with the proposed global as the Guggenheim, but with much stronger local consituencies. Context: From Lintukoto to Guggenheimlichkeit (and back) Earth was believed to be flat. At the edges of Earth was Lintukoto, "the home of the birds", a warm region in which birds lived during the winter. The Milky Way is called Linnunrata, "the path of the birds", because the birds were believed to move along it to Lintukoto and back. In Modern Finnish usage, the word lintukoto means an imaginary happy, warm and peaceful paradise-like place. From Palace to Node: local cultural institutions traditionally perform a vital function as the medium of sultural debate and expression of the most privileged: a non-violent space fo contest between factions inclined to cosmopolitan progressivism, and others preferring local, traditional, tribal, particular. Superstructure: PICTURE STONES (kuva kivet) A network of semi-sculptural urban objects, whose surfaces are of two kinds: static/reflective (mirror finish stainless), and dynamic/pictorial (LED panels). In its positive aspect, the Guggenheim project represents a "parti pris" on the side of universalist progressive tendencies, whether in New York in 1943 or more recently. Helsinki does not need to pay massive tribute to the contemporary Guggenheim's expansionist bulimia to get the benefit of that. The nodes mark shared (public) spaces. Their programming is determined at a variety of scales, from ultralocal neighborhood creation and curation to participation in a global network of exchange of iconography. The smallest node may be single, a shape between rock and phone booth, locally-made imagery playing across its surface at hours agreed upon by the neighbors one winter evening, against the dim haze. The largest may be groupings of shapes from that scale up to the size of a lighthouse, in rough formations conducive to gatherings, mixing local and international programs in their skins, subject to curatorial consensus at metropolitan or national or global network levels. We propose to democratize the "museum effect", to offer it to a healthier balance of (globalizing) humanism and (local) creative community. The Guggenheim project isn't all bad! As a global cultural project, it helps to identify local cultural and intellectual and patron elites with, rather than against, each other. That post-war modernist project still has its value, even as Blitzkrieg and Shoah recede from living memory. Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim is a giant sculpture, designed to make its urban context (fifth avenue) recede as background, as generic, as hard to remember, essentially treating the streetscape as a blank gallery space for itself. Gehry's is a bit more complicated in its relationship to its setting, but still intended to pre-empt what goes on around it, and within... The network of stones and clusters is to be built out over time, from a first set at the south harbour waterfront, into the surrounding urban fabric as local desires and consensus accrue, and in due course internationally, adding up eventually to a loose network of cultural projects every bit as A cynic might suppose that Madrid was keen to shift Basque conversations from independence to generic cultural tourism in Bilbao, and to send its post-industrial cityscape into the background of some beauty shots of a giant abstract sculpture from the forties, but that cynic would have a hard

5 time explaining who would feel the same need in Helsinki, whose south port doesn't really seem to need the up-staging, and whose social-political landscape is much less, uh, bumpy. We aren't proposing against the Guggenheim Helsinki so much as an evolutionary step beyond its current framework. Formally, this amounts to nothing more complicated than breaking up the mega-sculpture captial project into smaller pieces, pieces small enough to participate in an already-rich urban setting and contemporary cultural context, modest enough to be built and operated at the right range of group scales locally, wired enough to plug into international and global peer networks as appropriate beyond the design life of an overscaled and idiosyncratic trophy building, in ways we don't presume to predict from here, or now. Where the Guggenheim Bilbao inflated and hollowed out a sculptural vocabulary from between the two world wars, we offer objects even more generic, as reminiscent of stone gardens as of computer graphics, billboards, and (yikes) public art: distinctive enough to mark particular places in specific urban fabrics, flat enough to support an ongoing program, whose process can be as valuable as its products in fully public spaces, spaces whose character remains, indefinitely, a matter of debate and invention for the glocals. Why should Helsinki be another international art market colony? Why shouldn't it be the first node of a richer global cultural project, the establishment of a worldwide network of genuinely local cultural projects, identified closely enough with each other to keep the big picture in mind from any given perspective, and grounded enough in local experience... The network can scale and morph wihtout losing its integrity, or its sense(s) of place(s), over time. Picture Stones: UN-Sieidi About the superficial resemblance of our proposed "kuva kivet" to Sieidi (Sami sacrifice stones)... we make no special claim to knowledge of local prehistoric spirituality, and we aren't suggesting that tourists participate in animal sacrifice re-enactments! It's a simple matter of basic formal features: simple and distinctive alterations to particular places, to produce durable local landmarks whose social value endures through their adaptability to future exepriences and gatherings. BILBAO This also has to do with the not-flat not-vertical not-rectangular picture spaces created by individual objects, and their particular groupings: as the sculptures are offered up for perpetual re-surfacing with imagery we might not even want to know about as we offer to build them now, so we ask that makers of those new images accept the eccentricity and particularity of specific image planes, actively (make work to fit) of passively (let the image crawl and bleed over the skins as it may). Fig. 2 Guggenschiff. The objects are designed to require this for symbolic reasons, and practical: too-convenient picture frames would not only blend into the global network of networks of conventional mass media, but in particular suggest and support advertising uses.

6 The attached sketches are offered as concepts, rather than take-it-or-leave-it configurations. The people who will live with them, and feed them, and decide whether or not to keep them, should participate in their placement, scaling, orientation. The resulting network of installations in Helsinki will be grow and morph over time. As the city fabric evolves (hopefully not too fast or too slowly), some may yet be worth keeping in place to constrain that flow, and to maintain the integrity of the paces they help constitute. From New York City (Guggenheim-land), Helsinki may seem a bit like a Lintukoto ( figuratively, a beautiful paradise, implicitly too good to be true) for those who think of culture as a social/collective project, rather than a commercial spectacle industry... we might hope that our naïve stereotypes of Finns as inclined to the formation and operation of robust cooperatives might bear some truth, and that Helsinki might lead the way in seeding/proving out another model of large-scale public art-making: a global-scale conglomerate of small-scale local projects administered over the long term by their committed, competent, and creative neighbors, exchanging ideas and images with peer groups anywhere, on equal terms.

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11 Helsinki, Finland NORWAY FINLAND RUSSIA SWEDEN HELSINKI HELSINKI URBAN DIAGRAMS- LOCATION

12 KATAJANOKAN TERMINAL OLYMPIA TERMINAL BUILDING GREEN SPACE OPEN/GREEN SPACE PUBLIC OPEN SPACE WATER EXISTING ROAD DESIGN AREA BIKE LANE (1.7 Km) RUNNING PATH (1.5 Km) URBAN DIAGRAMS- EXISTING&PROPOSED WALKING PATH (1.6 Km) SITTING AREA TERMINAL

13 COVERED CI VI C MARKET

14 BUILD- Cave PICTURE STONE- Un-Seidi THE CITY THE WATER INFRASTRUCTURE- Unland THE CITY CONNECTOR URBAN DIAGRAMS- DESIGN CONCEPT

15 KATAJANOKAN TERMINAL TERMINAL DESIGN AREA EXISTING ROAD BIKE LANE (1.7 Km) RUNNING PATH (1.5 Km) WALKING PATH (1.6 Km) SITTING AREA OLYMPIA TERMINAL TERMINAL HISTORICAL BUILDING ART EXHIBITION IN/OUTDOOR PUBLIC SPACE IN/OUTDOOR PUBLIC MARKET BIKE LANE (1.7 Km) RUNNING PATH (1.5 Km) WALKING PATH (1.6 Km) URBAN DIAGRAMS- ACTIVITIES

16 OUTER LAYER THE SKIN INNER LAYER SECTION OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES INDOOR ACTIVITIES URBAN DIAGRAMS- ACTIVITIES